Make Pinyin Subtitles

This tool makes pinyin subtitles by converting Chinese to pinyin.

Select a file to convert to pinyin

Supported subtitle formats: srt, ass, ssa, smi, sub, webvtt

About pinyin subtitles

Watching Chinese movies or tv shows with pinyin subtitles is a great way to practice your Chinese. Pinyin (??) is the official romanization system for Mandarin Chinese in China and Taiwan. In other words, pinyin is a system of phonetic transcriptions of Mandarin Chinese that helps you pronounce the characters.

This tool changes normal srt or ass subtitles to pinyin subtitles. Both simplified and traditional Chinese are supported. Subtitles are always converted to srt first.

VLC not displaying Chinese srt subtitles correctly

If VLC media player shows Chinese subtitles as weird symbols or as squares, then you either your subtitles are not in unicode UTF-8, or you are using the wrong font in VLC. All tools on this website encode files in UTF-8, so if you use this website you can be sure encoding is not the problem. Here is a simple guide for getting Chinese subtitles to work in VLC.

Convert modes

This tool offers three modes for converting Chinese subtitles to pinyin subtitles, they are described below.

Add pinyin underneath Chinese

This mode adds a line of pinyin underneath each line that contains a Chinese character. Lines that do not have any Chinese in them are left untouched.

Before After 766
00:36:32,480 --> 00:36:34,450
?????8????


767
00:36:34,480 --> 00:36:35,610
-?????
-8???.


Add pinyin underneath Chinese and remove non-Chinese lines

This mode does the same as the mode described above, except it also removes lines that do not contain any Chinese characters. Using this mode works best when you have a bi-lingual subtitle file, like one with Chinese on the top line and english on the bottom line.

Before After 987
00:59:22,517 --> 00:59:24,142
?????
I played Ping-Pong

988
00:59:24,218 --> 00:59:27,812
?????????
even when I didn't have anyone to play Ping-Pong with.

Replace all Chinese with pinyin

Like the name says, this mode replaces all Chinese characters with pinyin. This mode only changes Chinese characters, and leaves all other text unchanged.

Before After 141
00:06:42,937 --> 00:06:45,337
????,??????

142
00:06:45,506 --> 00:06:48,270
????????????
????????�